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Milk Biscuit
Put 3/4 of a cupful lukewarm milk into mixing-pan. Sift in 1 quart flour; add 1 tablespoonful each of butter and lard, cottolene, or other fat. Mix into the flour before adding to the milk 1 heaping teaspoonful baking-powder and 1/2 teaspoonful salt; mix all together into a soft dough. Lay out on floured bread board, roll an inch thick and cut into rounds, and bake in buttered tin. Brush over with melted butter.
Milk-and-water biscuit are made in the same manner as milk biscuit, but instead of using all milk, as for the milk biscuit, use half milk and half water.
A plain baking-powder biscuit from the era when flour was still measured by the quart. The proportions are lean by modern standards, and the liquid is almost certainly short for today's flour.
- A quart of flourFlour measured by volume: 1 quart is 4 cups, roughly 1 lb of all-purpose. Everything else in the recipe scales from that figure.
- The liquid is shortThree-quarters of a cup of milk to 4 cups of flour will not come together as the "soft dough" the recipe calls for; period flours were softer and thirstier in different ways, and cup measures were loosely packed. Expect to need something closer to 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 cups of milk. Add it gradually and stop when the dough is soft but not sticky.
- LeaveningOne heaping teaspoon of baking powder for 4 cups of flour is light for modern powders. Current practice is about 1 teaspoon per cup of flour, so 3 to 4 teaspoons.
- Order of mixingWhisk the baking powder and salt through the flour first, then work in the fat, then add the milk. Leavening stirred into a wet dough distributes badly and leaves bitter spots.
- CottoleneA branded cottonseed-oil shortening, blended with beef fat rather than hydrogenated, heavily marketed in American kitchens from the 1890s and offered here as a substitute for lard. Any solid vegetable shortening, or all butter, works in its place.
- Very little fatTwo tablespoons of fat in a pound of flour makes a firm, bready biscuit rather than a flaky one — closer to a plain scone or a dinner roll. If you want a tender, layered biscuit, that is a different recipe; this one is deliberately austere and meant to be eaten hot with butter.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Biscuits of this kind want a quick oven, 425 to 450F, for 12 to 15 minutes, until the tops are just coloured.
- Thickness and yieldAn inch thick is thicker than most modern recipes ask; it gives a tall biscuit with a soft centre, so err toward the longer bake. A quart of flour cut in 2-inch rounds yields roughly 12 to 15.
- Milk and waterThe variation at the end halves the milk with water, which would presumably have stretched a costed household item. It produces a slightly drier, less browned biscuit.
"Milk biscuit" belongs to the great American family of quick breads that followed the spread of chemical leavening in the second half of the nineteenth century: no yeast, no waiting, mixed and baked between the setting of the table and the sitting down to it. The name distinguishes it from water biscuit and from soda biscuit raised with saleratus and sour milk, and the closing note on halving the milk with water suggests dairy was a costed household item rather than something taken for granted. The naming of Cottolene beside butter and lard points to a book of the branded-shortening era, roughly the 1890s onward, though such products were sold over several decades and cannot date a text closely.